SCIS2SD & Amiga 2000 with A2091

[spacey]

i have a feeling this subject is way more complex than this, but...

i picked up a SCSI2SD v5, and set it up with a 8gb SD card (divided into three drives - first 480mb, the other 2 around 3.5gb).. my 2000 still has its old HD, and i recently upgraded the KS rom to 3.1.

at first when i booted using the WB install disk in order to use HDToolBox, all the drives were there.. i setup each drive, but no matter what i did only the first drive would show up in WB (even though they was all present in HDToolBox).

i tried HDInstTools instead and made more progress.. doing a quick format of each SD card drive resulted in them showing up in WB, which is great BUT.. the SD card drives except for the first one say they're 100% full which is weird.

i've seen that pre-7.0 roms in the A2091 can't handle drives larger than 1gb? my roms don't have any useful label on them, so i'm not actually sure which version they are. they each have a red sticker with hand written numbers: 722-06 & 721-06... not sure if that actually means anything.

has anyone else run into similar issues?

[idrougge]

The other partitions may cross the 4 GB boundary, which will require a patched scsi.device or new file system. Try to make all partitions below 1 GB and see if they appear.

[Marchie]

I would go with idrougge's advice,

I recently installed a SCSI2SD v5 in an A2000 with a 16Gb card, and had problems until I kept the drives under 1G. (actually I went with 930mb to be safe from the whole decimal vs binary thing)

1Gb partitions on a 4Gb drive do not work, but 4 x 1Gb drives did. Has been rock-solid ever since.

[spacey]

ahh interesting.. i had tried various sizes, but not limiting the combined size to under 4gb. thanks guys - will give that a try!

[Jope]

Please dump the old ROMs, in case they're some version that is not yet archived.

I recommend upgrading to 7.0 in any case.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by spacey

i've seen that pre-7.0 roms in the A2091 can't handle drives larger than 1gb?

Yes. (and no). Filesystems that use normal IO method are restricted to 1G (drive size is correctly reported but any access attempt outside of first 1G returns IO error because device internally use old style 6-byte SCSI commands that have 1G addressing limit).

Direct SCSI capable filesystem don't have size limits (old SFS, PFS3DS, PFS3AIO)

they each have a red sticker with hand written numbers: 722-06 & 721-06... not sure if that actually means anything.

Perhaps it is 6.0 and someone mixed part numbers and versions:

390721-01 / 390722-01 = 6.0 (possibly also 6.1, perhaps others too)
390721-02 / 390722-02 = 6.6 (same)
390721-03 / 390722-03 = 7.0

Type "version full scsi.device" in shell window.

[mark_k]

Originally Posted by Jope

Please dump the old ROMs, in case they're some version that is not yet archived.

Yes. Dumping them doesn't require any special hardware or removing the chips from the card, just running a program on the Amiga.

Does the SCSI2SD allow you to specify the emulated SCSI drive's sector size? If so, using 1024-byte sectors will raise the drive size limit with older A2091 ROMs to 2GB, or 4GB with 2048-byte sectors.

[spacey]

ok, keeping the devices under 1gb each did the trick! all drives now show up correctly.

Yes. Dumping them doesn't require any special hardware or removing the chips from the card, just running a program on the Amiga.

sure, i can give that a try. what program do i need?

[mark_k]

There are various ones, you could use TrackDOS or Mon for example.

Here's how to do it using Mon. See this pic (remove ! from URL after pasting into your browser):

http://www.media!fire.com/view/8ciwba7so91topy/A2091_ROM_saving.png

Easy steps: Open a CLI/Shell. Run ShowConfig to see which address your A2091 is at. It'll print something like

 CBM A590/A2091 HD controller:   Prod=514/3($202/$3) (@$E90000 64K)"

Your board might be there or $EA0000, $EB0000 etc. Run Mon then type

] E98000 8000 RAM:My_A2091_ROM.bin

and press Return, then x and Return to quit Mon. Replace E98000 with the right value for your A2091, e.g. if ShowConfig says @$EB0000 you'd type EB8000 instead of E98000.

[spacey]

apologies for taking so long to get around to this. life etc etc.

"version full scsi.device" shows 6.6, so i'm not sure the rom will be of any interest, but i did a rom dump anyway just in case.

thanks again for the help! the SCSI2SD has been running just fine.